At just 24, Nashville-based artist Liza Anne – born Liza Anne Odachowski – sounds like she's been making music for decades. This might be because Fine But Dying is her third album, but it marks a poptastic new path for the former much-folkier artist. Here she tackles anxiety, depression and other struggles head-on in such a bold, candid way that it feels at once personal and strikingly relatable. Paranoia and the danceable Small Talks are upbeat, melodic slices of an anxious mind that are charming, not saddening. The delicately voiced, haunting Panic Attack is a goose-bump-inducing walk-through of its title subject matter ("I never learned to pull myself out of my own damn head") that shows Anne – as with the like-minded Courtney Barnett – can carry a song on voice and words alone. There's nothing weak-kneed about the material, with Anne even spitting feminist fire on the smouldering, gritty Kids Gloves ("I need you, I need you, I need you to stop handling me"). Apart from the impressive musicality, one of the most inspired aspects of Fine But Dying is that Anne is fiercely strong, awkwardly vulnerable, wise and, well, unwise all at once. BRONWYN THOMPSON

Gypsy music is proliferating like a plague in Australia, the quality swinging between banal and sublime, with both camps including copyists and freer thinkers. That Spyglass Gypsies extricate themselves from the pack is largely thanks to their original songs. These come from all five members, and while each composer has quirks and flairs, it adds up to a cohesive body of work. Despite the band's music being rooted in the Django Reinhardt tradition, one of the most striking pieces is Balkan-flavoured: bassist Shannon Haritos's rapid-fire Ricochet, the sizzling melody of which is matched by the improvising's spit and crackle. As good as Andrew Scott (accordion) and Loretta Palmeiro (clarinet, soprano saxophone) are, it is Cameron Jones and Richard Ashby's guitars that further define this band. Their rhythm playing gives the songs bounce, where so many guitarists attempting such music make the rhythms wooden. Ashby's ability to be elegantly melodic whether travelling at velocity (his own Well, That's It, or over more lilting terrain (Palmeiro's Longe) is also a hallmark. The band is at its best when scything a distinctive path, rather than playing "generic Gypsy" without the requisite spark. JOHN SHAND

ELECTRONIC Moby

EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL, AND NOTHING HURT (Pod/Inertia)

★★★☆☆

Anyone who has read a recent interview with Moby will tell you he's angry about the state of the world. Yet his 15th album finds him mumble-singing and groggily rapping, rather than yelling from the White House gates. As usual, the PR machine is heralding a return to the sound of his 1999 monster Play – and, as usual, it's not really true. He takes more from '90s trip-hop than anything else. Lead single Like A Motherless Child is built around a spiritual from the US south during the era of slavery, but the low clucking of electric guitar, the slam-clunk beat and Moby's subdued spoken-word are all set to simmer rather than boil. He leans on the talents of a handful of female vocalists – Mindy Jones, Julie Mintz, Apollo Jane, Raquel Rodriguez – who all keep the dial set to "ethereal croon". Moby shakes off the chill-out room gloom and cafe-soundtrack ennui when he unclenches his jaw and gets more in touch with his heart on the personal reflection and melancholy sweep of The Middle Is Gone and the affecting auto-tuned lament The Tired And the Hurt, where the contrast between light and dark, hope and despair are laid bare. BARRY DIVOLA

SINGER-SONGWRITER Jonathan Wilson

RARE BIRDS (Inertia)

★★★★½

Jonathan Wilson recognises that the music he makes is from another era: "Ah, these kids will never rock again … sign of the times", he sings on 49 Hairflips. Nonetheless, Rare Birds still sounds like a million bucks, simultaneously lush and pristine. This isn't surprising if you know his CV: he produced Father John Misty's albums, and recently toured Australia with Roger Waters. Wilson has a calm singer-songwriter's voice – reminiscent of Jackson Browne or the band America – and plenty of song-writing skill. The album feels like a joyful plunder of a rock'n'roll museum: Trafalgar Square initially sounds like spacey early 1970s Pink Floyd before abruptly turning into something like T-Rex covering Bob Dylan, while Over The Midnight sounds like a letter to the modern indie band War On Drugs in which he suggests himself as a producer for their next album. Rare Birds is not in a hurry to reach its destination (the shortest track – the Beatlesque Miriam Montague – is more than 4½ minutes long), but the length of the songs is the result of a man with a lot of ideas and a facility for good rock grooves. TIM BYRON

I'd been listening to this for a while, trying to work out what was different. Eventually I turned to the liner notes and press release: it is an all-analogue, all-valve recording, made with the four players in the same room, without headphones. That's why it sounds different: the connection, the immediacy, the warmth of sound. Sometimes the old ways are the good ways. Sydney drummer Andrew Dickeson grabbed the prominent New York tenor player Eric Alexander when he was in town, and teamed him with pianist Wayne Kelly and bassist Ashley Turner on material mostly from the mid-steam of the standard repertoire. Alexander combines a hard-edged sound and a penchant for fleetness (sometimes reminiscent of Johnny Griffin) with a gift for making potentially hectic phases of the music sound relaxed and effortless. The latter quality is shared by Dickeson, whose mallets playing on Invitation imbues the piece with a sense of mystery that the others sustain. Elsewhere it is not so much the sort of album to electrify nerve-endings as to reassure with its grooves, although a reimagined The Surrey with the Fringe on Top comes as a fun surprise. JOHN SHAND

CONTEMPORARY CLASSICAL/FOLK The Chanterelle String Quartet

MUSIC BY STEPHEN LALOR (CHANT001)

★★★☆☆

Stephen Lalor wears many hats. ABC Music Producer, music educator, Sydney Symphony's go to man-of-the-mandolin … Now this album from the Sydney-based Chanterelle String Quartet reveals him as a multilingual music-maker as well, with a collection of moody, folk-flavoured dances for strings and mandolin. Lalor, who speaks fluent classical as well as Irish, Russian and pretty much everything in between, makes good use of the range of timbres offered by a string quartet. Psychadelia is a wacky riff – Norman Bates at a barn-dance – while Bukovina Odyssey and Kolo Kolo head into gypsy territory, with suitably soulful lyricism from cellist Adrian Wallis and lead violinist Fiona Ziegler. Hitchhike to Galway demonstrates the percussive and surprisingly powerful twang of the mandolin, and East-West takes it into the tricksy rhythms of central Europe. This, the ensemble's debut album, is slightly hit-and-miss. The members, all Sydney Symphony regulars, play immaculately, but a bit of edge wouldn't go amiss, and the queasy Autostrada Waltz Revisited and Kavkas settle into amiable jogs that won't set the dance floor on fire. It's worth hanging in there, however, for the wistful, catchy ride of the Flying. HARRIET CUNNINGHAM